Predicting Terrorist Attacks

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Predicting Terrorist Attacks

An increasing number of contracts are being given out by the Pentagon with the seemingly Quixotic goal of predicting human behavior. For example, there's the Integrated Crises Early Warning System, which looks at modeling potential political instability. But what about predicting terrorist events? A team led by the University of Alabama in Huntsville is looking at using computer models to forecast future attacks. Researchers at the university are working with a private company ona six month Air Force contract.

"One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers’ methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions," said UAHuntsville researcher Wes Colley said. "Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection."

There are at least two main barriers to this sort of research. First, you need data, or more precisely, accurate data, otherwise it's "garbage in, garbage out." And second, you need models that work. This is how the researchers are approaching the problem:

Afour-step process was used in this research, according to Colley.Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types.

The four steps were:create a database of past attacks; identify trends in the attacks;determine the correlation between attacks and use analysis to calculate the probabilities of future attacks and their location.

The goal was not to try to predict exactly when and what type of attack was going to happen next, but rather, which target types were more likely to be attacked next, according to Colley. “Our research won’t predict that an attack targeting civilians at a public market will take place tomorrow at 9:30 a.m.”

The purpose of the models, the researchers reasonably argue, it to provide commanders in the field with information that could be used for planning. So, it's not a crystal ball. The hope is that even general models, if accurate, would be useful. The question is, how useful?Human behavior is subject to hundreds of variables.